Appeals court: Pirate Bay admins still guilty, now with higher fines

Three admins behind the Pirate Bay are still guilty, according to a Swedish …

Three of the admins behind The Pirate Bay are all still guilty, a Swedish appeals court decided on Friday, but their jail time has been reduced. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom's prison sentences have all been reduced from the original one year to between 4 and 10 months each, though the trade-off is an increase in damages that they must pay to the music and movie industries.

The Swedish district court found four of the Pirate Bay members guilty of assisting copyright infringement in April of 2009, despite the fact that the site never hosted any of the files being shared. The mere fact that the Pirate Bay provided "sophisticated search functions" and links to .torrent files where users could get illegally shared music, movies, and TV shows was apparently enough to convict them. The four were sentenced to a year in prison each plus a shared 30 million kronor fine ($4.26 million at today's conversion rates).

Now, three of the four will be able to get out of jail early—the fourth member, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, was unable to make the appeal hearings—but their shared fine has been bumped up to 46 million kroner (just over $6.5 million). That's still lower than the 117 million kronor fine initially sought by content owners, but definitely nothing to sneeze at.

The prosecutors had argued that the Pirate Bay admins had grown fat on ad revenues, and the appeals court seemed to agree that increased payments to the entertainment industry will have a bigger societal benefit than holding Neij, Sunde, and Lundstrom in jail for a longer period of time.

"[The increased fine] is because the court of appeal, to a greater extent than the district court, accepted the plaintiff companies’ evidence of its losses as a result of file-sharing," the appeals court said in a statement.

The site itself has managed to stay up during all of this legal back and forth, despite numerous attempts to take it down. Recently, a German court issued an injunction against one of the Pirate Bay's chief ISPs, Cyberbunker, demanding that service to the site be cut off, but the pirates have since shuffled around their ISP and hosting setup in order to remain online.

Unsurprisingly, the Pirate Bay admins plan to appeal the decision once again, this time taking the case to the Swedish Supreme Court. "They’re giving us jail even though it’s not the right thing for the 'crime.' It’s just to scare people," Sunde told TorrentFreak.

Members of the entertainment industry don't think so, though. "It’s a relief that the court of appeal finally affirmed that you’ll be sent to prison if you carry out this type of activity," said the lawyer representing Warner Bros., MGM, and Columbia, Monique Wadsted.

In a separate quote given to the New York Times, she also predicted the eventual downfall of the Pirate Bay and sites like it. "My assessment is that in two years this type of piracy activity will be completely dead," Wadsted said.